An emotionally distraught Rachel Wade, after hearing the sentence of 27 years in prison for the stabbing of her rival in love, Sarah Ludemann. Did Rachel have a split personality? And did she use social media to make her look tougher than she actually was? Or was Rachel possibly deluded into believing this was Reality TV?
Rachel openly threatens to murder Sarah, and sounds more like Linda Blair in The Exorcist than the sweet blond from the Beth Karas interview. Also, I noticed that social media plays a strong role in this voicemail, since the source of Rachel’s anger is the photo Sarah posted on MySpace of her and the slippery little loverboy, Joshua Camacho.
Rachel Wade Murder Charge
True, this case is over with; Rachel Wade first got a second-degree murder charge back in July, and last Friday a Florida judge, Joseph Bulone, sentenced the 20-year-old woman with a very fair 27 years in prison. What is not so clear, is just what happened in the year leading up to the April 15, 2009 stabbing.
That is, it looks to me as if Sarah Ludemann played an equally aggressive role in baiting and antagonizing Rachel Wade. It’s known that on that fatal night of the stabbing that Sarah Ludeman drove a mini-van over to where Wade was staying to confront her. Rachel’s attorney, Jay Hebert, believes the chapped girls were going to jump his client.
With that in mind, this looks more like self-defense than cold-blooded murder. And yet we have to return to the chilling voicemail where Rachel talks tough, uses foul language, and actually utters the words “I’m going to kill you.” And how many other times did Sarah taunt Rachel? Did Sarah force Rachel into a role she didn’t really want to assume?
Apparently, Sarah had gone by Rachel’s job at Applebee’s a number of times, where she worked as a waitress, and harassed her repeatedly. I haven’t heard exactly what she did to bother her, but I have heard that Sarah was a very big girl weighing in at nearly 200 pounds. My theory is that Rachel used social media in order to project herself as mean and tough and capable of holding her own against the brutish Sarah Ludeman.
Role of Social Media
I don’t have a complete enough inventory of all the voicemails, text messages, emails, FB postings, or MySpace entries of these two troubled teens to really get a clear enough picture of the exact role of social media in these altercations, that finally leads to murder. I suspect it plays a bigger role than initially imagined.
And then there is the flaky gigolo-like punk, Josh Camacho. How much blame should be placed on his shoulders? He was playing these two off on one another, and taking pleasure in their escalating cat-fights that became a public drama, like a Reality TV show where teenage girls will fight to the death just to create a viral YouTube video.
I’ve heard that on the night of the stabbing, that Josh had slept with Rachel the night before, then invited her over the next day for a repeat of the Love Rendezvous. However, when Rachel returned the next day, Sarah had assumed her position as love paramour, so an emotionally distraught Rachel flees the scene and heads over to a friend’s house.
It must be noted here that is was Sarah who sought out Rachel, and with a vehicle no less. But there were ‘aggravating circumstances’ that night that would include several nasty exchanges of text messages between the angst-gripped teens and a threatening cell phone call that Rachel placed to Sarah. Social media was the direct trigger.
The Theory of Rachel Wade’s Persona
My theory is that Rachel felt strength when she hid behind these electronic devices, and could project the kind of sting that might scare the heftier Ludemann girl. Social media turns her into IronGirl and gives her the push, the angst to challenge her adversary.
When interviewed on TruTV (think Superman returning to his Clark Kent role), she morphs back to her dainty, ‘true self.’ Her split personality is a result of a mitigating factor of gigantic proportions, the interjection of electronic gadgets into the teenage melodrama, that tends to transform the storyboard.
